Shocktober 2025 - Creepshow (1982)
“The Most Fun You’ll Ever Have Being Scared” – advertising tagline
The advertising tagline I’ve used as a quote pretty much sums up how I feel about Shocktober, my long, looooong running annual celebration of horror movies. (For those of you who are new to this, Shocktober started back in 2006, when I used to blog over at MySpace. My content there was a warm-up to my opening my own website. The original one ran for 13 years and some of the content is available at the Internet Archive. Over the past three years, this has been my base on the web and the home of Shocktober. So, 19 years and running, but due to real-life stuff happening, I skipped two years so this is the 17th time I’ve actually written and published it.)
Over the coming month of October, I’ll be publishing no less than thirteen articles. These will be retrospective looks at 13 movies I’ve selected from my collection – in other words, The 13 Screams of Halloween. They’re all brand new articles, never published anywhere before. Fresh from my tortured brain, straight to the hard drive of my computer, via my keyboard. The selection process is a bit of a mystery even to me. I try not to repeat myself, and I don’t think I have, to date. Maybe once…maybe.
Anyhow, this year seems to have landed us squarely with a look at movies from mainly the seventies and eighties. (Mainly.) They’re a mixed bunch, as usual. There’s no real theme other than “films Robin hasn’t seen in a while and fancied revisiting”.
My opening movie is Creepshow, which I feel is pretty appropriate. So, we’re heading back to 1982 – a staggering (for me, at least,) 43 years ago.
1982 – I was 22 years old, on the cusp of executing my plan to make the major purchase of my first VHS recorder, which would enable me to start collecting the films and TV shows I loved so much. (I might as well have said it was the last time I’d ever have a residual income to speak of. I took to collecting movies like a junkie to crack).
I was writing movie reviews then, on a typewriter. That was my first foray into all…this. Those early reviews have never been published anywhere, and they never will. They’re all filed away in binders – around five- or six-years’ worth. I look at them sometimes, just to make myself cringe. But they’re valuable to me. From the start, my style of writing (if any style exists that can be attributed to me) was a light humoured look at the movies, with a bit of an autobiographical twist in there. I guess not much has changed over the years.
There was of course no internet back then, so my movie news came from magazines like Starlog, Fangoria and Starburst, and my knowledge from books and attending screenings at the local flea pit – I didn’t have a car back then, and multiplexes weren’t a thing. But I knew that George A. Romero who’d directed Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead was directing a film written by Stephen King. I’m pretty sure I was avidly reading Stephen King by then. So this was a movie I needed to see. Not only that, but it was an anthology movie – a format of movie I loved since seeing the Amicus Productions movies Dr Terror’s House of Horror on TV and From Beyond the Grave, the first horror film I saw at the cinema at the tender age of 13.
An anthology? From my favourite author and the cool zombie movie dude? I’m IN.
I read the reviews. I read the features. And I waited. Fruitlessly.
Creepshow never came to this forgotten little burg. (Neither did Poltergeist, the same year.)
BUT – help was at hand thanks to Home Video!
Creepshow is a homage to the lurid horror comic books of the fifties, titles like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror were prevalent before the do-gooders cited them as the unfounded causes of (get this) juvenile delinquency and homosexuality among American youths. (Those darn comic books are gonna make you deviants, young people!) This is despite the stories being morality tales. Good will always triumph over evil and in some ingeniously gory twist endings, the protagonists will always get their just desserts. Evil gets as evil does.
The five stories in the film are taken from the first issue of Creepshow – the fictional comic book that provides the background of the film with its prologues and the epilogue, in the Amicus tradition. Kicking off the film is an all too familiar sight, a young boy (Joe King) being shouted at by an overbearing father (Tom Atkins) for reading a horror comic, and having the comic confiscated and thrown in the bin. (Yep, been THERE.)
The wind blows the comic out of the dustbin in an animated sequence and we close in on the opening page of the first story.
Father’s Day
“Where’s my cake? - Nathan Grantham
It takes but one glance to see that the Grantham family are a bunch of rich, entitled, unpleasant snobs. There’s nothing likeable about them. The matriarch is Sylvia (Carrie Nye) and with her are her two unpleasant spawn, Richard (Warner Shook) Cass (Elizabeth Regan) and Cass’s husband Hank (Ed Harris). There’s a gathering of the clan to celebrate Father’s Day. And they’re waiting for Aunt Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors) an eccentric spinster, and a vital part of their sordid family history.
Years ago, Bedelia was her and Sylvia’s father’s carer. Nathan Grantham was a nasty, demanding bully who had arranged the “accidental” hunting incident where Bedelia’s lover was shot and killed. One Father’s Day, he was in full flow tantrum, demanding his Father’s Day cake and berating Bedelia who retaliated by beating him to death with a marble ashtray (which incidentally can be seen in all five stories).
Sylvia helped cover everything up and she and Bedelia enjoy the wealth of their inheritance.
Now, every Father’s Day, Bedelia comes home sits by her late father’s grave with a bottle of Jim Bean before heading in to a baked ham supper. Except this year, Bedelia spills the whiskey onto the grave with surprising results. A worm-eaten, maggot ridden Nathan rises from the grave, killing Bedelia, Hank and Sylvia, before confronting Cass and Richard with Sylvia’s head on a plate, adorned with frosting, chuckling “it’s Father’s Day and I got my cake”.
The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill
“Meteor shit” – Jordy Verrill
In the second tale, Jordy Verrill is played by King himself.
One night, Jordy, a poverty-stricken farmer sees a meteor land on his property. Now, Jordy isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, and King plays this to perfection with his eye rolling antics. Jordy’s immediate reaction is to sell the meteor to the local college, who he imagines has a Dept of Meteors – and they’ll pay the fine price of $200 for it. “Fine meteor, fine price” he muses.
But first, he has to, as he says; “cool the sumbitch down” and so he throws a bucket of water on it, splitting it in half, and releasing a parasitic alien vegetation, which grows rapidly on everything it touches – including Jordy himself. It turns him into a kind of a moss-man. In despair, Jordy shoots himself and the surrounding area turns green with a weather warning there’s rain on the way.
They’re Creeping Up on You
“It’s Showtime” – Richard
Much as I enjoy the first two stories, the shock factor of Nathan Grantham’s hand suddenly appearing out of the soil, and the hopeless pathos of Jordy Verrill’s ordeal, I’ve felt over the years that they’re just the curtain raisers, the warm-up, if you will. With the third story, Creepshow really hits its stride. This one is the most reminiscent of the type of story that EC Comics used to publish in Tales from the Crypt. (Well, from the reprints I’ve read anyway.)
It opens with a confrontation as Richard Vickers a (pre-Airplane and Police Squad Leslie Nielsen) visits Harry Wentworth (A pre-Cheers and Good Place Ted Danson) at home. Vickers knows that Harry has been having an affair with Becky (Gaylen Ross), Vickers’ wife. And Vickers keeps what’s his. He invites Harry to join him to see Becky. They drive to Vickers’ private beach, where at gunpoint, he buries Harry feet first in wet sand, incapacitating him. Then, he sets up a video monitor so he can see Becky, whom he’s similarly buried further up the beach. Vickers leaves both of them to be drowned by the incoming tide.
Some time later, Vickers’ house is visited by both Harry and Becky, both of them now salt water saturated, waterlogged zombies who are out for revenge. Understandably, this sight breaks Vickers’ mind (but we’ve guessed by now that he’s a bit unstable anyway). The final scene shows Vickers, buried up to his chin in sand waiting for the tide to inevitably come in, babbling; “I can hold my breath for a looooooooooooong time.”
The Crate
“Just call me Billie. Everyone does.”
This is the one that everyone who has seen the film remembers.
Horlicks University, during the summer recess. The janitor discovers a dusty old wooden crate, hidden in under a basement stairwell. It seems to have been there since 1834. He contacts the head of department, Professor Dexter (Fritz Weaver) currently at a faculty social gathering to come and investigate. Dexter is glad of the excuse to leave.
Also at the party are his friend, the mild mannered to the point of being mousey and unassuming Professor Northrup (Hal Holbrook) and his loudmouthed shrew of a wife, Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau). Northrup constantly fantasises about killing the demeaning harpy. Meanwhile, in the basement, the crate is opened – and there’s a feral, toothy beast inside. They refer to it as a Tasmanian Devil – and it kills and eats both the Janitor and an unlucky grad student. Dexter calls Northrup for help, and Northrup suddenly realises that here’s his chance to get rid of Wilma for once and for all – feed her to the Tasmanian Devil. There’ll be no evidence, and all he’ll have to do then is get rid of the crate by throwing it off a cliff into a lake.
But what if the Tasmanian Devil breaks loose underwater?
They’re Creeping Up on You
“I’ve got this bug problem” – Upson Pratt
The final story might be the most disgusting one of the five.
E.G. Marshall plays Upson Pratt, a ruthless, cruel business mogul. A friendless man who lives alone in a hermetically sealed penthouse apartment in New York, due to his suffering from mysophobia – in other words, he has a crippling fear of germs, and bugs. But no matter how well sealed his sterile apartment is, cockroaches still find their way in.
We get a glimpse at his sheer nastiness when he threatens to fire an employee if they don’t immediately cut short their family vacation to solve his bug problem, and his goading of the widow of his business rival who’s just shot himself and his patronising casual racism towards his African-American building superintendent.
During a power blackout, the cockroaches advance in their hundreds, causing Pratt to retreat to his sealed vault-like bedroom with its independent oxygen supply, but they’re already in there too.
When the power comes back on, we see Pratt’s body on his bed, closing in, we see his body begin to pulsate, as thousands of cockroaches disgustingly burst out of his corpse. Maybe he was the biggest bug of all.
In the film’s closing epilogue, it’s the morning after the prologue, we see a couple of refuse collectors, one played by the makeup effects genius Tom Savini, who provided all the gore and grue for this outing. They find the discarded comic book and notice that one of the mail-in ads, this one for an “authentic voodoo doll” has been cut out.
Back in the house, we see the father at breakfast, suddenly writhing in pain, as upstairs, his son gleefully jabs away at his voodoo doll; “I'll teach you to throw away my comic books. Ready for another shot, dad?”
Shocktober will continue with the Second Scream in a few days. Get set for revenge shenanigans with a Shakespearean twist.
